Saturday, August 17, 2013

Enter at Your Own Risk

August 18, 2013Dear Friends,The floor is in!! It is beautiful!! And Miss Annie will now walk on the new floor although she still takes cautious steps.The front hose has responded to intervention by a friend with piers and now waters only flowers, and does that only when requested to do so.However, the kitchen disposal remains plugged pending the persuasive action of a plumber.An alas, the new computer continues to sit in the garage safe in its impressive boxes awaiting technically literate folk who will assemble it and connect it to its esoteric energy sources. The new printer is still in transite.I am attempting this note to you all via my iPad. Truly an adventure! For obvious reasons, it will be brief.It has been an amazing month. There were days when I thought everything that could come apart would do so. No such thing threatened, of course, but it was truly the season of disintegration. The list of things that came apart or broke was truly impressive. Things are on the mend, but, as I noted, we continue to post a sign out front that reads: CONSTRUCTION IN PROGRESS!! ENTER AT YOUR OWN RISK!!A friend asked, tongue-in-cheek, if I thought I had become a target of attack by the dark world."No such drama," I told her. "I am simply suffering from the law of entropy."In the field of physics, entropy refers to the process by which everything runs down or decays without periodic infusions of new energy. No one has every built a perpetual motion machine that never ran down, or a watering system that never leaks, nor computers that do not eventually flat-line and fail to boot up.Confronted this month with a great deal of concrete evidence that the principle of entropy is firmly operational, I am thinking about stewardship of my diminishing stores of energy.I plan to polish some old silver and to buy an inexpensive "just because gift for an old friend before I talk with you again.Thinking with you about those things and those relationships that I value and into which I need to choose to invest energy if I wish them to endure. See you next week. Gay